This year's conference on November 13-14, 2018 will feature keynote speaker Liz Ogbu, a designer, urbanist, and social innovator who collaborates with communities to leverage the power of design to catalyze sustained social impact. Ogbu has taught at California College of the Arts, UC Berkeley, and Stanford. She has also been chosen as a TED speaker, one of Public Interest Design’s Top 100, and an Aspen Ideas Scholar. Her keynote speech will focus on how to emphasize the lived experience of people at the heart of housing issues and explore how we can achieve a more sustainable, inclusive, and healed future.

Morgan Stanley is our newest Platinum level sponsor of the 2018 Vermont Statewide Housing Conference. The conference will be held on November 13th and 14th at the Hilton Burlington. Conference registration is now open, with special early bird pricing available for a limited time only.

VHFA Executive Director Sarah Carpenter joined affordable housing partners and elected officials to celebrate the start of construction of Garden Street Apartments on Market and Garden Streets in South Burlington. The apartments will be built by Snyder Braverman Development and sold to Champlain Housing Trust and Housing Vermont upon completion. The project will create 42 affordable apartments for low-income Vermonters as part of a 60 unit mixed income building. The affordable units will be rented permanently at well below market rates.

A recent report from researchers at Ohio State University and Fannie Mae describes new evidence of ways to extend homeownership sustainably.  Lower income households seeking to purchase homes face many barriers including lack of wealth for down payment.  Further, “after purchasing a home, lower income homeowners are often at higher risk of default due to unaffordable mortgage terms, higher loan-to-value ratios, and fragile household balance sheets,”  the report notes.